Baking the daily bread at a wholesale or commercial bakery demands a whole lot of many different types of flour to make a whole lot of different kinds of dough. There’s bread flour, cake flour, pastry flour, white whole wheat flour, semolina, spelt, and gluten flour, and that’s just considering the wheat flour family. Modern bakeries also bake breads, rolls, donuts, muffins, pastries, cookies, and other products using almond flour, cassava flour, rice flour, tapioca flour, and other gluten-free and vegan options to keep pace with changing consumer dietary needs and preferences.

Today’s consumers and foodservice industry customers demand a wide array of fresh, baked goods year-round plus seasonal treats and limited-time specials without much interest in paying higher prices. That puts the onus on bakeries to constantly respond with new and different products and varieties while somehow cutting costs. One way we’re seeing growing bakeries address this situation is by automating how all of these different types of flour are transferred or conveyed from storage into a mixer. Historically, this is one of the most time- and labor-intensive parts of running a bakery business.

Automating Powder Handling in a Bakery for Efficiency, Safety

In a typical bakery, a worker picks up a heavy bag of flour from inside a store room, carries it to the mixer, and cuts it with a knife to empty the flour into the mixer, then returns to the store room for a heavy bag of salt, sugar, or another ingredient, and goes back to the mixer to add each successive ingredient. This process gets repeated day and night and is one reason why many bakers suffer from back injuries, cuts to the hands, and respiratory issues from inhaling ingredient dust over time.

Bakery owners and other food manufacturers who pay attention to staffing, turnover, payroll costs, and worker safety challenges are automating this part of the operation with a versatile powder conveyor called the Volkmann VS pneumatic vacuum conveyor. Instead of requiring workers to carry heavy bags, a single worker can load the flour into the conveying system from the storage area. Then the vacuum conveyor gently and automatically transfers the flour directly to the mixer or to a hopper at the mixing equipment through enclosed piping or tubing. Either a suction wand can be used to load the powdered ingredients directly from the bag or bin into the conveyor, or the bag can be emptied into a companion Rip-and-Tip bag dumping station set in the storage area, then transferred automatically at the press of a button. A lump breaker or sifter can even be added to the bag dumping station to remove any lumps or clumps that may have formed while the flour was sitting in storage. The risk of putting hands in or near the mixer or blender is also eliminated.

Conveying Equipment Versatility Offers SKU Flexibility

After transferring the flour, this same pneumatic vacuum conveying system can be used to transfer coarse salt, fine confectioner’s sugar, frozen berries, or chocolate chips. It’s so versatile it can transfer cake flour at a particle size of 20 microns then switch to transferring semolina flour at a particle size of 500 microns with no loss of performance. Since the same ingredient sold from one supplier may be slightly different than from another supplier in particle size, shape, moisture content, or other properties, or from one batch to another batch, the conveyor’s versatility enables bakers to try new and different ingredients and grades, and try different, lower cost suppliers, without disrupting the ingredient handling system. In some cases, a minor adjustment to the amount of suction flowing through the conveying system may be needed to maintain peak efficiency when changing over from one ingredient to another, and this can be done on the fly in seconds with no tools.

When switching to a gluten-free or allergenic ingredient from an all-purpose flour, for example, our food-grade Volkmann VS vacuum conveyor disassembles without tools for thorough cleaning and can be returned to service in a matter of minutes. We include stainless steel construction as standard.

For bakeries that need to produce many SKUs in high volumes, scale up from smaller operations, changeover several times per day, and also solve labor issues, the Volkmann VS pneumatic vacuum conveyor offers the flexibility, versatility, and reliability to automate an inherently slow, manual part of the baking process. The very reasonable price point to get started is just the icing on the cake.